As discussed in this blog post, the impact which Brexit has on the UK’s copyright regime will largely depend on the exact form that Brexit takes. Whilst copyright has remained far less harmonised across EU member states than other IP rights, one aspect of UK law which has been affected by the EU is the…

The court of appeals confirmed that there had been infringement of copyright in the claimant’s photographs, and in doing so, clarified the requirements for the protection of photos as copyright works. The court provided guidance regarding lump sum compensation as an alternative to compensation by way of direct damages. A full summary of this case…

The French Supreme Court stated that the lower courts must take into consideration all the choices of the author in order to decide whether a work is original and therefore protected by copyright law, and not simply the common aspects of the work. A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP…

The Polish Supreme Court held that the use of elements of a work of authorship, which are widely known and available (in the public domain), in another work in which those elements were combined in a different way, constitutes an expression of individual creative thought, and cannot therefore be regarded as an infringement of copyright…

A recent judgment by the CJEU set aside a decision of the General Court annulling an OHIM decision to invalidate a Community trade mark owned by the National Lottery Commission, based on the presumed existence of an earlier copyright. The CJEU remitted the case back to the General Court for a ruling taking into account…

Erno Rubik, creator of the famous Rubik’s Cube, brought suit against a Dutch enterprise that trades in gift articles, including the so-called ‘Magic Cube’, which strongly resembles Rubik’s own ‘Rubik’s Cube’. Prior to the Supreme Court proceedings, the Arnhem Court of Appeals ruled that the (combination of) the Rubik’s Cube’s characteristic six colours was considered…

The bizarre saga known as Garcia v. Google has finally come to end with an eleven judge en banc decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (Garcia v. Google, Inc., 786 F.3d 733 (9th Cir. 2015)). That holding came in response to a remarkable, if not astonishing holding by a…

The Court of Turin held that the main idea for a finished work (a TV commercial for the FIAT 500) had been developed in an initial project carried out by the claimant and that this project was the basis for the subsequent authors’ work. Consequently, the commercial was evidentially a development of his original idea. His work was therefore…

This ruling, rendered by the IP specialist section of the High Court of First Instance of Paris, breaches the most basic EU and French copyright law, by refusing copyright protection to an obviously original photographic work. This very surprising ruling is unfortunately just another ruling contrary to the elementary rules of copyright law that has…

A claim for infringement of copyright and design rights failed. There was no good reason to reject evidence that the fabric in question was created without sight of the claimant’s fabric; the similarities between the designs were not sufficient to infer that there had been subconscious copying. A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP…